The “radio voice” was established early: it demanded a norm of intonation, inflection and voice projection which was as absolute in its rules as the BBC’s so-called “standard English”. Deep chest tones, bland assurance, total lack of hesitation or error were essential, so as to convey that ineffable, indispensable quality-Sincerity. This exaggerated diction also helped to compensate for the primitive equipment and the bad reception in “fringe” areas…
(1948) FM radio was just being launched in America. Therefore there were open channels available which were not yet worth a great deal of money, since there were very few receivers and only a small audience. The new medium was especially suited to the kind of broadcasting Hill intended, which was to achieve a high technical as well as intellectual and artistic standard. A few years earlier there would have been only low-fidelity AM channels, prohibitively expensive to acquire; a few years later FM would also become expensive, though not in the same league as AM, whose broadcast radius and therefore its audience were much greater. In the meantime the asset, a greenfield site, would become also a liability as KPFA struggled to reach an audience without FM receivers….
Having established two totally revolutionary principles — absence of commercial sponsorship and indifference to a mass audience — Hill went on to describe in detail some of the attributes of a broadcasting medium which would conform to these criteria. The very fact of non-commercial broadcasting led at once to two interlocking principles: there was no time-ownership and no need for commercial breaks:
On examination of the tradition and uses of second-hand timing in commercial radio, it appeared that this practice had an entirely economic origin and meaning. Since at best it poses an obstacle to programming freedom, there appeared no reason whatever for its continuance in educational radio not engaged in the sale of time segments.
This had two highly pragmatic results: (1) the absence of commercial breaks meant that broadcasts could assume whatever attention span was required by the subject matter; and (2) this could be extended to its logical conclusion; i.e., a program could be as long as necessary or appropriate.
One of the many sources Whiting cites is: Lewis Hill, Voluntary Listener-Sponsorship: A Report to Educational Broadcasters On the Experiment at KPFA, Berkeley, California. Berkeley, CA: Pacifica Foundation, 1958. If anyone knows where I can get a copy, please holler.
“In a crisis grow. That’s the only creative possibility, take a risk and expand.” —Lew Hill
Lewis Hill co-founded Pacifica Radio (then KPFA & WBAI), based on “The Theory of Listener-Sponsored Radio.” In this taste of his 1951 treatise, he describes the commercial broadcast and how it differs from his new idea of a non-commercial radio:
Let me instance the announcer, not only to seize the simplest case, but because he will serve as the gross symbol for the writer, the musician, and all who try to make a living in the program end of radio. You will recall without difficulty, I hope, this fellow’s nightly solicitude toward your internal organs. In his baritone way he makes a claim on your attention and faith which few of your closest friends would venture.
I know of no better explanation of this man’s relation to you, to his utterances, his job, and his industry, than one of the time-honored audition tests given to applicants for announcing jobs at certain of the networks. The test consists of three or four paragraphs minutely constructed to avoid conveying any meaning. The words are familiar, and every sentence is grammatically sound, but the text is gibberish. The applicant is required to read this text in different voices, as though it meant different things: with solemnity and heavy sincerity, with lighthearted humor, and of course with “punch.”
If his judges award him the job and turn him loose on you, he has succeeded on account of an extraordinary skill in simulating emotions, intentions and beliefs which he does not possess. In fact the test was especially designed to assure that nothing in the announcer’s mind except the sound of his voice–no comprehension, no value, no choice, and above all no sense of responsibility–could possibly enter into what he said or what he sounded like. This is the criterion of his job.
The significance of this situation is strangely neglected, as I have said, although the commonplaces of industrial life that best explain it are much discussed. We all know, for example, that the purpose of commercial radio is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm, and the activity must be conducted as nearly as possible without risk of departure from the norm. But art and the communication of ideas–as most of us also appreciate–are risky affairs, for it can never be predicted in those activities just when the purely individual and abnormal may assert itself. Indeed to get any real art or any significant communication, one must rely entirely on individuals, and must resign himself to accept not only their uniqueness but the possibility that the individual may at any time fail. By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry reduces the risk of failure (abnormality) and assures itself a standard product for mass consumption.
We know these commonplaces, but it is truly staggering to contemplate what they imply and cause in American radio. Should you inquire why there is no affinity between the serious arts and radio, you will find that this is the reason.
America is well supplied with remarkably talented writers, musicians, philosophers, and scientists whose work will survive for some centuries. Such people have no relation whatever to our greatest communication medium. I have been describing a fact at the level of the industry’s staff, it is actually so notorious in the whole tradition and atmosphere of our radio that it precludes anyone of serious talent and reasonable sanity from offering material for broadcast, much less joining a staff. The country’s best minds, like one mind, shun the medium unless the possessor of one happens to be running for office. Yet if we want an improvement in radio worth the trouble, it is these people whose talent the medium must attract. The basic situation of broadcasting must be such that artists and thinkers have a place to work–with freedom. Short of this, the suffering listener has no out.
“The Theory of Listener-Sponsored Radio,” Lewis Hill 1951, from The Exacting Ear: The Story of Listener-Sponsored Radio, and an Anthology of Programs from KPFA, KPFK, and WBAI, Eleanor McKinney, Editor, (Pantheon Books/Random House, 1966).
Lorenzo Milam is “the Johnny Appleseed of community radio,” sez Broadcasting magazine. He helped establish KRAB-FM in Seattle in 1962, which grew into the KRAB nebula, a loosely affiliated group of freefrom stations (KTAO, KBOO, KDNA and KCHU — “the wet spot on your dial”).
Here’s an excerpt from Milam’s seed-planting guide Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community (available at: Prometheus Radio Project | Amazon):
But listen: the fears of the community radio people, I am loath to tell you, come as strongly from within as without. It works like this: people like you and me who are involved with strange and honest broadcast operations have a looseness in the brain-pan. We (you and I, love) operate best through tension, insane schemes, and bizarre fears. We seem to create nests of slander, inwit, neurotic outrage, and mental dyspepsia.
I tell you all this not to cover you and me and the existing community stations with calumny. But rather, to suggest that as you move towards getting your operation on the air, you should also set about defusing the madness inherent in the people who will come to be volunteers or staff for you.
See: commercial radio stations have a built-in defusing process which is make-money. You don’t have that. What you have is a group of dedicated sincere people who want to Do Good and Right. And they are all crackers. Aren’t we?
Choose your fellow workers carefully and well. Get people who are stable and loving and involved, but get people who have a life outside the station. Because they can drive you (and it) balmy.
Listen: the reason KRAB was such a benign operation through its first five years was not just because Seattle is such a benign city where the outrage of free speech has been tolerated up through the ages. Nor is it because for the first Ave years we were convinced that no one ever listened to us: what with our two hour concerts of Korean Temple Bells and weekend extravaganzas of the music of Dahomey. No — it was because Nancy and Gary and Jeremy and James and I were careful to people the station with richly self-contained individuals. Good people, who loved listener-supported community radio, and what it could do for our minds; but, individuals who valued life outside the station.
It was not just that we took a couple of gallons of Mountain Red to the board meetings; it wasn’t that we practiced an anarchistically politically detached wryness in our daily lives: it was, most of all, that we had a loud early warning system which went off whenever ‘political’ types came in the door. And I ain’t talking about communists or John Birch Society members.
You will have hundreds of volunteers. They, and your board and staff, should be apolitical. Apolitical in the most inner sense. Apolitical in that you can only survive through openness, warmth, and a militant avoidance of rumor. You must be a lightning-rod.
“A radio station should not just be a hole in the universe for making money, or feeding an ego, or running the worldhellip; A radio station should be a live place for live people to sing and dance and talk: talk their talk and walk their walk and know that they (and the rest of us) are not finally and irrevocably dead.”
—Lorenzo Milam
Public Radio is in transition. CPB and other tri-letteral commissions believe radio must march into a new world order of MyFaceSpace YouTwits.
I’ve never put faith in people’s predictive powers — we humans are remarkably bad at it. But I do think a journey into an unknown future benefits greatly from a grasp of the past. So I spent a sleepless night chasing tidbits of pubradio history, especially from community radio pioneers like Lorenzo Milam and Lewis Hill.
HV kicks off April by posting some excerpts from these early essays and books in our Writs- Pubradio category. We’ll start with the seminal Sex and Broadcasting.
Radio is Dead. Love Live Radio.
“But the spectrum is as big as all outdoors — and there is a niche here, a crack there, for those who care to squeeze some of the art back into radio.” —Lorenzo Milam
Hearing Voices from NPR®:
055 WordshakerS: For Poetry Month
Host: Andrei Codrescu of NPR / Exquisite Corpse
Airs week of: 2012-04-04 (Originally: 2009-04-01)
We at HV are now twits, but with a twist. Most tweets are rapid and vapid. We’re experimenting with another approach: slow and substantive: twitticisms. Every morn we add enter another line from R. Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb, delivering discrete daily doses of philosophically dense data.
Running along the footer of that book’s pages is a continuing line of text. The book’s out-of-print so we’re resurrecting these Bucky bits in 140-character chucks. Follow us @hearvox or read the whole below.
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe. –R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb (1970)
This text is the footer of Bucky Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb:
Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.
Either man is obsolete or war is. War is the ultimate tool of politics. Political leaders look out only for their own side.
Politicians are always realistically maneuvering for the next election. They are obsolete as fundamental problem-solvers.
Half-century of subconsciously developing world revolution is crossing threshold into human consciousness and ultimate popular support.
Today’s students, reared by television, “the third parent,” think world.
They think and demand justice for all humanity with no exceptions.
Theirs will be the most powerful constructive revolution in history. Earth is a very small spaceship. We are all astronauts.
Each human is a whole universe. We have 28,000 pounds of explosives for each human being on earth.
Weaponry has always been accorded priority over livingry. Only two alternatives — Utopia or Oblivion.
All the fundamental problems are world problems. Man knows so much does so little.
Greatest fact of century: We can make life on earth general success for all people.
World’s prime vital problem: How to triple swiftly safely satisfyingly overall performance realizations per pounds kilowatts manhours of world’s comprehensive resources, rendering those resources capable of supporting one hundred per cent of humanity’s increasing population at ever higher standards of living than any human minority single individual has known or dreamed of.
War over population hunger disease would cease to exist if “haves” devoted larger share of their industrial budget to world livingry.
Malthus is wrong. There is enough to go around.
Basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both-ergo-someone-must-die tenets of class warfaring are extinct.
Real wealth — indestructible, without practical limits — is combination of physical energy and human intellect.
Every time we use real wealth it increases. Intellect must increase wealth to eliminate poverty.
Design science, invention revolution could elevate poverty to haveness.
(If you can produce it, you can afford it. If you can’t produce it, you can’t afford it.)
Intelligence should be recognized as a global resource. Brain stores retrieves special case experiences.
Mind discovery generalized patterns apparently governing all special case experiences.
Thinking is the consciously disciplined separation of relevant feedback from irrelevant feedback.
Greatest single revolution in human affairs has been ascendancy of intellect’s intuitive mastery over the physical but all the important critical events realizing that revolution just happens.
Only the impossible happens. Probability unreliable. To each of us environment is everything that isn’t “me.”
New, physically uncompromised metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify world.
It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of man’s antibody, the computer.
Only to their computer’s superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political scientific religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.
Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being simple muscle and reflex machine, a slave automaton.
(By 1975 China may be most impressively modern nation, highly automated.)
Automation can produce wealth beyond all our needs and dreams.
(We’ve always had automation. What’s happening to your lunch?)
Automation has made man obsolete as physical production and control specialist — just in time.
Specialization is only a fancy form of slavery wherein the “expert” is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially culturally preferred, ergo, highly-secure, life-long position.
Nature always does things in simplest most efficient way. All nature is based on triangles.
Nature doesn’t have separate departments of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics.
World society is operating almost exclusively in inaudible nonvisible area of physical universe.
We are living in a world where change is normal.
Because prime evolutionary transformations are invisible, it is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that changes in next 30 years will be far greater than in last 100 years. It is approximately impossible for world society to comprehend that.
Artists are now being recognized as extraordinarily important to human society.
Scientist are utterly irresponsible regarding pro-vs.-anti social disposition of “eggs” they lay in the laboratories.
Every child is born a genius: Ninety-nine percent are degeniused by early post-natal circumstances.
Human being has great potentiality, but many wires get disconnected.
Ages 0 to 4 are biggest “school” opportunity. Child is trim tab of the future.
Least favorable environment for study is schoolroom and closely-packed desk prisons.
Real schoolhouse is in the home and outdoors.
Within 10 years anything reasonably think-upable by science fiction will probably have been realized.
Possession is becoming progressively burdensome, wasteful, and therefore obsolete, total man may be going through a total wave of transformation into an entirely new relationship with the universe.
Man freed of special case superstition by intellect has had survival potentials multiplied millionsfold.
Humans can now whisper in one another’s ear from anywhere around the world. (Be sure to entertain all your emotions.)
Intellectual integrity will win tomorrow’s battles with accelerating inexorability.
Political commercial sham false premise institutions will vanish with startling rapidity.
Man, as designed, is obviously intended to be a success. Success: not a bad thing to have “hanging over your head.”
Experiment is always valuable. You can’t learn less. You can always get nearer to the truth.
(Language can be a block to reality.) Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and Universe is ahead for all of us.
(Man was designed with legs — not roots.) Man can do anything he wants.
We present a more realistic approach to spiritual awareness: how updated yogic breathing and stretching exercises might help relieve stress for office worker bees and corporate clones… or not. Audio by author Rebecca Flowers from an NPR story she produced. Animation by Max Darham. “Office Yoga:”
For a recent This American Life, “The Inauguration Show,” I was among several producers TAL asked “all over the country to go out and talk to people about what they’re thinking as Barack Obama gets ready to take office.” From the dozens of hours of interviews, they crafted another fine TAL hour.
I went to our state capital, Helena MT, to talk to citizens, and to the “citizen-legislators” now in session. (The Montana legislature meets only 90 days every two years, so our reps are real folk most of the time and only part-time pols.)
I’m posting a few of the more fascinating MT voices which couldn’t fit in the TAL episode. Each offers a singular vision of political history:
State Representative Brady Wiseman
(D– Bozeman MT)
“They have eaten out our essence…” (1:38 mp3):
Brady is a friend and a real big-picture person. We’ll be posting a longer vers of his interview soon, with transcript, cuz I think people should hear what this guy has to say.
Hearing Voices from NPR®
054 Food Fight: The Dark Side of the Muffin
Host: Larry Massett of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2010-11-17 (Originally: 2009-03-25)
[Today is the final broadcast of NPR Day to Day. The show, which has aired so much HV stuff and been a pleasure to work with, has been canceled.]
Much of our news today is like much of our food today. Heavily processed. Raised in cages, fed hormones and antibiotics. It makes us sick, maybe causes cancer. At least it doesn’t seem unreasonable that you could get cancer from the news.
But we need news, just like we need food. In order to maintain a civil society we need to stay well informed of the issues at hand, and the news is how we do this. So what we need is news that isn’t processed, we need more organic news.
In my opinion as a news connoisseur and critic, Day to Day was the cleanest, most ‘wild caught’ program produced by NPR. Sometimes after listening to the program I actually felt better. I had more energy and eagerness to go about my life. I wondered what would be on the show tomorrow. More than anything Day to Day gave me hope of hearing something really fresh and true. If anything suffers in processing, it’s the truth.
Faced with alleged budget shortfalls last Fall, some of NPR’s 17 vice presidents decided to cut Day to Day from it’s schedule and fire everyone who worked there. Personally, I would have erased all vice presidents. When was the last time you heard of a vice president in a news room? There are people called editors and producers and engineers in a news room but nobody goes by vice president, let alone 17 people who go by vice president all making around a quarter million a year. Not to mention their secretaries and assistants. Maybe some country club memberships.
This class of NPR employee apparently doesn’t mind producing and consuming processed news. They’ve done tests and conducted studies that show the news they produce is made from the best ingredients, assembled by trained professionals, all approved by the Columbia School of Journalism, and brought to you at a surprisingly inexpensive price. They are marketers and lawyers, and I say they should be gathered together and marched out onto the downtown Washington street on a snowy day and made strip down to their underwear, and then every single one of them should be fired and forced to eat nothing but Big Macs for the rest of their lives.
Nine former prisoners describe their experiences in solitary confinement. Produced for the STOPMAX project and video, working to end cruel treatment of prisoners. (Voices: Robert Dellelo, Munirah El-Bomani, Tommy Escarcega, Ray Luc Levasseur, King Arch Angel, Hakeem Shaheed, Bilal Sunni-Ali, Laura Whitehorn, Robert King Wilkerson.) Aired on NPR Day to Day; by producer Claire Schoen, “Solitary Confinement” (7:19 mp3):
Guide Jane Mills take us on a night tour inside the walls of Port Arthur, Tasmania’s former convict settlement and notorious 19th century penitentiary, now one of Australia’s top tourist attractions. Aired on PRI The World; by producer Jake Warga, “Ghostly Prison- Tasmania” (2:49 mp3):
Sez Larry: “My neighbor Rich Keplar is a regular-guy neighbor. He’s a picture framer, a Vietnam vet, his wife’s a lawyer, they have two kids in college, a dog, and a lawn. But one day he mentioned he writes poetry — strictly amateur, never published. So I asked him to read me a few, expecting… well, I don’t know exacty what, but certainly not this…”
Miracle Draven was a homeless girl on the streets of Portland, Oregon. She recounts a day in her life as a crystal meth addict. Excerpted from a longer work (2005) at Stories1st.org. Aired on NPR Day to Day; by producer Dmae Roberts, “Miracle on the Streets” (3:27 mp3):
Hearing Voices from NPR®
052 Circus Blood: Under the Big Top
Host: John Dankosky of Connecticut Public Radio
Airs week of: 2012-02-01 (Originally: 2009-02-25)
Adam Rosen mixes a medley of the many versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, The Tokens, The Nylons, Miriam Makeba, Robert John, and Manu Dibango).
In 1984 people told producer about their dogs and their dog’s dreams, produced with Christina Eggloff for their series Animals and Other Stories, with funds from the New York State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Our new survey awaits your answers. Tell us what radio programs you listen to. Tell us your favorite radio programs. Tell us if you still listen to radio over the radio, or over that there Intertubes .
Hearing Voices from NPR®
050 Love’s Labors: For Valentine’s Day
Host: Amy Dickinson of Chicago Tribune “Ask Amy”
Airs week of: 2012-02-08 (Originally: 2009-02-11)
One of the “6 terrific teen-age tunes sung by Barbie and Ken (and you can sing along, too!),” a 45-rpm record from Mattel Toymakers (mp3 at UBU.com’s 365 Days Project– May 31).
“In a crisis grow. That’s the only creative possibility, take a risk and expand.” —Lew Hill
Lorenzo Milam is “the Johnny Appleseed of community radio,” sez Broadcasting magazine. He helped establish KRAB-FM in Seattle in 1962, which grew into the KRAB nebula, a loosely affiliated group of freefrom stations (KTAO, KBOO, KDNA and KCHU — “the wet spot on your dial”).
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We at HV are now 
, delivering discrete daily doses of philosophically dense data.
We present a more realistic approach to spiritual awareness: how updated yogic breathing and stretching exercises might help relieve stress for office worker bees and corporate clones… or not. Audio by author 
State Representative 
State Senator 
State Representative 
Bishop David Eslick
(more) Rep. Brady Wiseman
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Nine former prisoners describe their experiences in solitary confinement. Produced for the 
Guide Jane Mills take us on a night tour inside the walls of Port Arthur, Tasmania’s former convict settlement and notorious 19th century penitentiary, now one of Australia’s top tourist attractions. Aired on PRI 
Miracle Draven was a homeless girl on the streets of Portland, Oregon. She recounts a day in her life as a crystal meth addict. Excerpted from a longer work (2005) at 
Our new survey awaits your answers. Tell us what radio programs you listen to. Tell us your favorite radio programs. Tell us if you still listen to radio over the radio, or over that there Intertubes .
